Woman of the world

A prize-winning novel is the latest triumph in an
action-packed life for this 22-year-old.

Swallow the AirBy Tara June Winch
UQP, 216pp, $28

TARA JUNE WINCH is chatting about child-rearing like an old
midwife. "When babies get tired, they kick their legs and wave
their arms around," she says matter-of-factly. In her arms, her
four-month-old daughter, Lila, demonstrates. "All babies do
it."

Spoken by any other 22-year-old, the wise-woman-of-the-world
schtick would come across as pretentious, even ridiculous. Instead,
Winch comes across as quietly self-assured and thoughtful.

It should be little wonder Winch is wise beyond her years. At an
age where most are studying, travelling or bumming around looking
for a life direction, Winch has been to university, endured five
months of monastic life in a Buddhist nunnery, travelled India,
lived in a Tibetan refugee community school, attempted to walk the
perimeter of Australia and given birth to a child. She's also just
published her first novel, Swallow the Air, for which she
won the David Unaipon Award (for unpublished works by Aboriginals
or Torres Strait Islanders).

The story follows young May Gibson, whose Aboriginal mother
commits suicide soon after we meet her. May and her brother, Billy,
grow up in the care of their aunt, but tragedy dogs them: the aunt
is alcoholic, her partner abusive and it's not long before Billy
runs away from home and develops a drug habit. At 17, May sets off
on a mission to find her father, but it soon becomes apparent that
she is really on a journey to find herself.

On her travels - whether she's living in the Block in Redfern,
wandering around Wiradjuri country near Lake Cargelligo, or
hitching to a mission in Euabalong - May asks locals where she can
find family. She dreams of stumbling upon Gibsons cooking goanna
around a fire and repairing a broken link with her Aboriginal
past.

The reality is disappointing: when she eventually finds an
uncle, he would rather get to his golf game on time than stop to
discuss the Wiradjuri history he was raised to disown.

Winch's mother is of English extraction and her father of mixed
Wiradjuri and Afghan heritage. She stresses that Swallow the
Air is not an autobiography, but admits she drew on her own
experiences when writing it.

"When I was 15, I moved out of home and was a bit all over the
place at that time. I got into uni, got my head together, but then
thought I wasn't into it," Winch says. "It wasn't what I wanted to
learn; I wanted to learn something else before I went to uni. So I
went round Australia when I was 17."

Her walk around the coast of Australia (she didn't quite finish)
was designed to raise awareness of reconciliation, but she admits
she was also fuelled by a deeper longing.

"I wanted to find out about my Aboriginality and thought I
needed to go to those communities and meet people to understand the
world and who I was," she says. "What do you need to do to call
yourself Aboriginal? There's this idea you have to be traditional,
living in the desert, wearing a lap-lap and living hunter-gatherer
style. You can only have black skin, brown eyes, flat nose. I felt
so proud to be Aboriginal but part of me was thinking, 'What is
going on? Am I allowed to be Aboriginal or not?"'

Like May, she went looking for an answer. Like May, she found an
uncle on a mission and was to be disappointed by the response.

"That really happened, he had to go to golf. That was the last
link, the furthest I could go back in my family and he turned to me
and said, 'We weren't allowed to be Aboriginals'. It was a kick in
the guts, she says, "to have that hope that you might find someone
who will say, 'Yeah, it's all right to be Aboriginal, girl' and
only find people who had left that side of their life behind
because their whole lives they had been told they weren't allowed
to be Aboriginal."

She says it's not an uncommon experience in NSW. "All that
culture has been dispossessed. It might be intact in the Pilbara
and up in the Kimberley but in places that were first contact ...
Well, the Wiradjuri were wiped out pretty much completely," Winch
says. "Of course there's not going to be a strong link there. Of
course not. I'm from a broken link. So what do you do? You realise
that what you are looking for, trying to find your Aboriginality,
your Aboriginality is in you. It's not necessary to go and find it.
But that's a journey [May] has to take."

Winch's book could be digested as a novel or a collection of
interlocking short stories. It could also be read as extended
prose; her style is poetic, even rhyming in some parts. Tragic
events are made more poignant by delicate descriptions that manage
to avoid being flowery. Most delicious is Winch's ability to
unpatronisingly capture accents: "Bloody millennium come and gone
and they still can't treat our people right," she writes in the
voice of an elder, Uncle Graham. "We seen 40 bloody millenniums,
our people, and they government give us credit for that? Only when
it suits them, when they gotta show all them tourists."

In between her big trip around Australia and publishing the
book, Winch has been on plenty of other adventures, including long
periods living the strict Buddhist lifestyle she first experienced
at childhood tai chi lessons at the Nan Tien Temple in
Wollongong.

"Aboriginal spirituality and Buddhism are really closely linked,
I think; the whole reincarnation thing and respect for the land. It
will always play a part in my life and the kind of person I want to
be," she says. Winch was part way into a six-month stint - she
calls it "getting your robes" - studying to become a nun in
Scotland, but stopped to chase a little more life experience.

"When I'm 50 and Lila is off doing her thing then maybe I'll go
back to it," she says. 'It's a beautiful lifestyle, but at 19 I
wasn't really ready. There was more I wanted to do."

Now, she's focusing on raising her daughter, finishing her
indigenous studies degree at Southern Cross University in Lismore
and continuing to write. Future adventures, she promises, will
involve exploring the Afghan side of her heritage.

"It's really common to have Aboriginal background with Afghan or
Indian heritage. The camel traders came out to desert areas and
usually married Australian women but didn't mix too much with the
white community. That's what happened in my great-grandfather's
case with my great-grandmother, who was a Wiradjuri woman. There's
a real love story there, I reckon, two desert people from other
sides of the world."

Don't expect a family history, however. Winch is adamant that
she writes fiction, not fact. How does she feel now that
Swallow the Air has been written?

"I feel like, 'Ahh!"' she says, letting out a satisfied sigh.
"It's like when you write a poem or that letter or email you've
been meaning to write, to say that thing, it gets it off your
chest. I feel different. I feel good."